


blue violet

by raspberrybeanie



Series: since the thing perhaps is to eat flowers and not be afraid (tma soft hanahaki au) [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (the major character death is peter lukas do not worry), Flower Symbolism, M/M, MAG159 The Last but with approximately 100000 percent more flowers, Magical Realism, Season/Series 04, The Lonely Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), hey so you know how this au uses flowers as a metaphor for love and healing??, soft/harmless hanahaki au, this is PEAK self-indulgence tbh, yeah the lonely doesn't like that.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-18 20:40:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28873230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raspberrybeanie/pseuds/raspberrybeanie
Summary: If you'd told the Jonathan Sims of a few years ago that one day, the only thing standing between him and an entity of distance and isolation would be his own overgrowing hanahaki, there's no telling what he would have said to you in return.Funny how things end up, isn't it.( jonny said it's my turn to undergo the tma fandom rite of passage that is writing a "retell MAG159 but with a twist" fic )
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Series: since the thing perhaps is to eat flowers and not be afraid (tma soft hanahaki au) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2110455
Comments: 20
Kudos: 80





	blue violet

**Author's Note:**

> [ adele voice ] hello, it's me, can you believe i've been a TMA fan for over a year and never written anything to do with the end of s4 yet? me neither
> 
> i simply have a lot of thoughts about soft!hanahaki's effect on the Lonely (and vice-versa, but that's for another fic) and sometimes when that happens the only thing left to do is retell a story through a new lens and fall into an uncharacteristic writing frenzy until you're done
> 
> uhh content warnings!  
> \- hanahaki-typical stuff, jon is coughing up flowers pretty much constantly during this one.  
> \- character death (it's Peter and it's not described graphically)  
> \- canon-typical Lonely content, canon-typical Jon's self-loathing and negative self-talk  
> \- jon gets a lil monster-y but like maybe y'all are into that?
> 
> please lmk if anything else needs warned for!

The Lonely is the coldest Jon's ever been.

The cold caresses his skin; it seeps into all the gaps in his clothes to form a clammy film over his flesh; it sinks down into his very bones. Jon shivers as the sound of the tide washes over him, somewhere close by, and yet still so distant. The fog is so thick that he can barely see anything, even without the sudden veil of condensation he has to blink away from his eyelashes. 

It's like being under the world's most cheerless blanket. Everything's so _muffled_ ; Jon tries to stretch his senses out, to crack open that door holding back the ocean in his head just a little, and - and it's like all he can find is more fog.

It's _horrible._

It is also not without its comfort.

Jon wraps his arms around himself, and starts walking.

He takes in more fog with every breath, every step. His chest feels like ice; his breathing leaves him in more small clouds of white fog, completely indistinguishable from the greater fog surrounding him. Has Jon _ever_ been warm?

He swallows, and calls out: "Martin!"

A cloud of vibrant blue and purple escapes his mouth alongside Martin's name, stark against the fog bank. 

Jon starts, staring at the petals as they drift down to land at his feet. He half expects them to be swallowed up by the fog, like Jon himself, like everything else in this place where everything is Forsaken. 

But it doesn't happen. Jon's blue violet petals sit there in plain view on the cold, pebbly shoreline, almost like the fog is--

"Avoiding them," Jon murmurs aloud. Something warm in his lungs, something behind all the fog he's been breathing in, flutters at the thought. Jon smiles grimly, and carries on taking step after dogged step along the beach.

"Interesting," he says to the fog. "It seems I have something you don't want to touch." He raises his voice again and cries, " _Martin!_ "

There’s no reply. Just the tide, washing in and out, and the fog, swirling either side of him and ahead of him and behind him.

And his little cluster of blue violets. Still sitting there, in stark view among all the grey a few steps behind him, a trail of breadcrumbs to mark his path.

Jon’s breath wheezes through his crowded windpipe. He coughs, and a shower of primrose and almond blossom floats out into the cold of the Lonely and down onto its shores, a tiny island in the fog.

Maybe it’s Jon’s imagination, but he almost fancies that the fog starts to billow more insistently, now. If it were human, he’d call it frustration.

“I’m not leaving without him,” he tells it, and keeps going.

The cold does not ease. The fog presses in on every part of him that it can reach; Jon’s feet are numb, Jon’s fingers are numb, Jon’s face is numb. Jon is alone.

But so is Martin, right now, and Jon _can’t_ let that happen. He’s already spent far too long letting that happen. 

He thinks of Martin, and everything he wants to tell him, and when his breath starts fluttering in his lungs he lets it happen, leaning into every cough and every exhale and welcoming it, walking the bitter chill with a trail of blue and purple and white and yellow stretching out further and further behind him every time he calls Martin’s name into the fog.

If the Jonathan Sims of a few years ago could see him now.

When Peter Lukas’s voice comes echoing out of the fog, Jon could scream, a sudden animal instinct of pure rage.

He doesn’t, though. He won’t. He won’t let Lukas distract him from what’s important. Martin is on the line. Martin is on the line, and Jon cannot afford the luxury of a moment of doubt.

 _How much do you really know each other?_ says the muffled, muddled voice, and, _The people you think you love don’t exist,_ and Jon thinks of every single cup of tea, every shared late-night takeaway from when Martin was living in the Archives, every quiet moment that they ever _have_ managed to claw out of the nightmare of the past few years, every petal that’s forced its way up out of his throat, and... 

Maybe he _doesn’t_ know Martin as well as he could, not yet, but he _wants_ to. He _wants_ to, more than anything. That’s – that’s not _nothing._

He manages to scare Lukas off somehow, one monster to another, with a wild shot in the dark that he must have managed to strike true with. And part of Jon wants to catalogue that, to chase it, but—

But suddenly, Martin’s there.

He barely looks like himself. If Jon thought the foggy chill of the Lonely was seeping deep down into the very marrow of his own bones, wherever it has found a foothold in Martin must be much, much deeper. There’s hardly any colour left in him. And where Martin has always had this sure, steady solidity to him, Jon has the wild thought that if he tried to reach a hand out to him now, he might find Martin no more substantial than the fog pressing down on them.

It scares him more than anything else.

And Martin won’t _look_ at him.

Jon can barely get two words out together without having to pause to clear his throat, a stumbling fall of dark pink and white and blue piling up at his feet, and Martin won’t _look_ at him, his eyes staring unfocused at something beyond Jon, or through him, the brown Jon remembers so well clouded over with a pale, murky grey.

“I really loved you, you know?” Martin says, and Jon watches a single, small petal like an insect’s wing flutter down between them, colourless and almost transparent.

Jon feels like he’s been punched.

Peter Lukas has done something, he _has_ to have done something, for Martin’s hanahaki to be so violently out of tune with his words, Martin who Jon has caught pulling off a polite, closed-mouth cough mid-sentence before quietly walking to the bin a few minutes later to carefully place a tissue inside ( _I’m usually better with mine, I don’t want to make you uncomfortable--_ )

 _Cyclamen_ notes the distant, hungry part of Jon that is the Eye, that doesn’t feel the icy talon that’s grabbed a handful of his insides and _yanked._ _Resignation and goodbye--_

And Martin is gone.

Tim and Sasha are dead. Daisy and Basira are probably dead. Georgie and Melanie have left him. Martin’s gone.

The bitter taste of asphodel and rhododendron on his tongue is so familiar by now that he scarcely registers it. Peter Lukas is right: Jon is nothing but a danger to everyone he claims to love.

But if Jon became an unwitting architect of Martin’s ruin, then Peter Lukas did so willingly. And Peter is nearby in the fog, and Peter is trying to push him into the bleak embrace of the fog, and the Eye and the Lonely aren’t so far apart, which means that Jon, hungry and ever roving and searching for knowledge, can _find him._

Jon wants to hurt him. Jon wants to drag all his secrets out of him like bindweed from a thicket of thorns. 

Peter Lukas can’t hide from him.

When Peter finally - _finally_ \- melts out of the fog, the look of discomfort on his face makes something inside Jon rumble in visceral satisfaction.

“Is all of that really necessary?” the captain of the Tundra says with a look of vaguely nauseous disdain.

Jon follows his line of sight down to the carpet of petals blanketing the small patch of beach in front of him. Against the endless grey of the Lonely, their little shock of vibrant colour almost hurts to look at.

“None of your business,” Jon snaps fiercely.

Peter sighs. “You made the choice to come in here and make it my business, Archivist.” 

Everything about the man is as grey as the entity he serves; his skin, his beard, his seaman’s jacket, his eyes the cold blue-grey of a winter storm. Even with almost all of Jon’s sight focused on him, the fog still clings jealously to his edges.

He wrinkles his nose now in distaste. “All seems very… _dramatic._ To say nothing of meaningless. All this display, and for what?”

Jon hates that even just a few years ago, he would have agreed with those words, even if he didn’t agree with the sentiment behind them.

“Oh?” he says now, his voice low and dangerous. “I’m sorry, am I making you _uncomfortable?_ ”

The stony look on Peter’s face says everything for him.

“Leave, Archivist. There’s nothing here for you.”

“Not until I get some answers.”

It is all too easy to lean into the compulsion and bring it all to bear down on Peter Lukas until the statement spills out of him; then Jon can do nothing but drink it in as the Archivist, uncomprehending, unheeding of _what_ the information is or whether it is useful, unfeeling except for the heady rush of satiation edged with the shuddering thrill of somebody else’s fear, like brine on his tongue.

Maybe part of him, distantly, is beating futile hands against an open door, clinging desperately to its frame so as not to be washed away. But that part of him is a tiny drop in a very large ocean, one that does not care if all Peter’s answers are a useless waste of precious time.

When the statement has run its course, when both the Eye and its Archivist are sated enough for now, when both Jon and Peter are released from being watched and watcher, Jon immediately doubles over. 

The flowers that have been building in his lungs, held back and clogged there by the process of taking a statement (useless, _useless,_ almost right down to the very last word) while Martin is still in there fading into the fog with each passing minute, spill out all at once. Jon gasps and chokes as they hit the pebbled shingle of the Lonely and send the fog scattering in eddies away from them.

Jon draws a hand across his mouth. His throat is raw as he gulps down ragged mouthfuls of the Lonely’s fog, trying in vain to get his breath back after hacking up what felt like an entire lung.

When he straightens up, still more lightheaded than he ought to be right after a statement, he finds Peter Lukas glaring at him with a distant disgust.

Oh, fuck you, Jon thinks tiredly.

He follows the thread back to the one, perhaps the only, single strand of anything useful that Peter had to say. With his voice rasping like sandpaper he asks: “What was his prize? What did Elias get if you lost?”

Peter doesn’t tell him, of course. Not in a way that gives him anything he needs to know. And Jon _needs_ to know, needs to understand, because Elias already has him, as the Archivist, as part of the Eye, so what else could Jon possibly _be_ in this wager—

Peter is ripped apart – _Jon_ rips Peter apart – in a savage burst of static and fog.

It’s like taking twenty live statements. Jon staggers away from the falling, fading static that marks all that remains of Peter Lukas like a man drunk, unsteady from the feedback of coming out on top in their metaphysical tug-of-war.

Stubborn fool. Stubborn, obstinate, obstructive fool. 

There are twin senses coiling within him, of bloated, satisfied over-fullness and of dull, deadened horror at his own actions, but Jon has no further thought to spare for Peter Lukas now.

Martin. He has to find Martin.

He doesn’t have to go far. The swirling fog shifts after only a few steps. It does not part; even now, it’s reluctant for Jon’s sight to pierce through it. But it _shifts_ , just enough for Martin to be seen, blurring at the edges.

Even if Jon were still able to hold back the rush of almond blossom when he sees him, he wouldn’t want to.

Still, he can barely speak. If he thought he struggled to get a word in edgeways before, it’s nothing to how it is now. Frantic, he tries to make it through a single damn sentence, struggling through the constant itching in his throat, and like some mocking feedback loop, his desperation only makes the whole thing worse.

Maybe it would be fine, maybe it would even help his case, prove that he means what he’s saying beyond any shadow of doubt – but Martin still isn’t looking at him.

 _I need you,_ Jon chokes out, scattering the perversely cheerful purples and yellows of primrose and bittersweet and heartsease, and _I don’t just want to survive,_ the words themselves strangled with blue violets and coral honeysuckle.

He may as well be speaking double Dutch for all the good it’s doing him. Martin stares through him, seeing without seeing him, and Jon’s little hurricane of colour floats down around him unmarked.

Desperate, Jon tries the only thing left he can think of.

“Martin.” He steps in close to Martin’s space, hands reaching out for his face and trying not to flinch when Martin’s frozen cheeks feel about as solid against his skin as thin air. Jon’s heart beats rabbit-fast, his throat scraped raw and his chest a full, quivering mess when he breathes in. 

He takes a breath, wills his voice to remain steady and his throat to remain empty for as long as it matters.

“Martin, look at me,” Jon says, winding the words through with what he prays is just enough compulsion to break through, and not enough to hurt him. “Look at me and tell me what you see.”

The staticky, fizzing buzz of the compulsion in his mouth passes through the Lonely, and slowly – slowly, Martin does look.

“I see…” he says, like the words are being dragged up from some great depth. Jon presses his lips shut tight, hardly daring to hope as the grey haze clears sluggishly from Martin’s eyes, something bright and focused stealing back in in its place. 

“I see you, Jon. I _see_ you,” he says, like he can scarcely believe it himself.

Jon could collapse with relief.

“Martin,” he breathes, and pulls him into an embrace – because it feels right, because it feels like there’s nothing else _to_ do, and because the flowers he’s been trying valiantly to hold back this whole time have nowhere else to go, now. Like this, he can at least let them spill down Martin’s back as he keeps him close, still ice-cold but wonderfully solid and here in his arms.

From the way Martin’s shoulders shake where they’re pulled against his and the gust of his breath through Jon’s hair, maybe he’s in the same place.

“I… I was on my own,” he manages, through a choked, hacking series of sobs. “I was all on my own.”

“Not anymore,” Jon says. He pulls away from Martin a little, just enough to come down off his toes. Not without some regret – but as miraculous as it feels to hold him, Jon refuses to spend a moment longer in this place than either of them has to. “Come on.”

He makes to take Martin’s hand, to lead him out – he’s not giving the Lonely any chance to snatch Martin away again if he can help it – but the tug back that he feels when he tries to start walking makes him stop.

“Um,” Martin says, looking dazed. Jon follows his line of sight behind him, and…

Ah. Good Lord, it really _is_ almost ostentatiously excessive.

“Jon,” Martin says, his voice thick. “Is that – did you – is all of that…”

God. Well. 

No point in beating around the bush, really, is there. 

Jon sucks in a breath, and nods. 

“All yours,” he says softly, words tripping over in a rush.

“Oh,” says Martin, his voice small, and now almost alarmingly thick. “Oh, my God.”

Jon can feel the self-consciousness rising up within him. He also decides that it can wait until both of them are as far away from here as possible. 

Tugging gently again on Martin’s hand, he says, “Let’s go home.”

“How?”

Surprising even himself, Jon laughs.

“Don’t worry,” he says, looking back along the bright trail of flowers stretching out along the desolate shoreline. “I know the way.”

**Author's Note:**

> the lonely: say it. say that love isn't real  
> jon: [ spits out a mouthful of petals ] fuck you
> 
> flower meanings for this installment!  
> blue violet: watchfulness, faithfulness, I'll always be true  
> primrose: I can't live without you  
> almond blossom: hope  
> cyclamen: resignation, goodbye  
> asphodel: my regrets follow you to the grave  
> rhododendron: danger, I am dangerous  
> bittersweet: truth  
> heartsease: you occupy my thoughts  
> coral honeysuckle: I love you
> 
> i have... a handful.... of fics for this series in the works (including a scottish safehouse era fic so... check off another jmart fandom rite of passage) but i'm not sure how long any of them will take me to finish. in the meantime, thanks for reading!!


End file.
